The word: Slime mould

TAKE a walk in the garden or woods in early summer or autumn and you may come across something on the ground that looks suspiciously like dog sick. It may be dog sick, but equally it could be a slime mould, a strange cross between an animal and a fungus that feeds on dead grass or leaves and thrives in the ground's moist warmth.

Why strange? Slime moulds are known as "social amoebas" but they don't behave like any other single-celled creature. The moulds are hard to classify because their life cycle is similar to a fungus's (they reproduce via spores), but they share more genes with animals than they do with, say, yeasts. We know about their animal genes because we now have the complete genetic blueprint for Dictyostelium discoideum, the most commonly studied slime mould (Nature, vol 435, p 43).

And then there's the outlandish way a slime ...

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